[carlosjobim]

> it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking

Booking.com doesn't know about any rooms that are not made available to them by the hotel, so everything is based on that. In my experience, most hotels just have all their rooms available at all times for booking.com - but maybe some of them experiment with availability to sell a bit more themselves.

The "A person just booked..." and "Only 2 rooms left" messages that booking.com uses to annoy customers are actually correct. I've worked on the other side, and seen from the backend that they don't lie.

> (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)

No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.

[severino]

> No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.

Yes, I think that's feasible. However, I sometimes stay at medium to small size hotels (doing my reservation through Booking or other 3rd parties) but when I get to the place, I can see them managing my stay using Excel files or similar "almost by hand" methods. So I was skeptical that those kind of places had actually a system that can automatically synchronize with all the third party platforms they use in real time.

[carlosjobim]

The absolute best in class of these systems cost $100 per month for a small-medium sized hotel, so it's not expensive at all. Many hotels still refuse to use them because of their own backwardness. Then they screw up and overbook and try to blame booking.com when they don't have a room for them.